Bloomberg Goes to Washington to Push Gun Laws, but Senate Has Other Ideas

By JACKIE CALMES and JEREMY W. PETERS

February 27, 2013

WASHINGTON — Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York met separately on Wednesday with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and several senators, a day after his campaign for tougher gun laws was newly fortified by the victory of his preferred candidate in a special Congressional primary election in Chicago where he had spent more than $2 million.

Meanwhile, a Senate hearing that included witnesses from the shooting in Newtown, Conn., aired exchanges both poignant and petulant. Questions by Republican senators underscored just how difficult a path such gun-control legislation faces despite the national horror over massacres like the one in December at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

While much of Washington seemed preoccupied by the partisan budget impasse and countdown to the automatic spending cuts scheduled to begin Friday, the maneuvering over the issue of gun violence was indicative of proponents’ efforts to keep it alive even as many fear that the sense of urgency after the Newtown shootings is waning. Speaking to reporters on leaving his White House meeting with Mr. Biden, Mr. Bloomberg took some credit for the victory by Robin Kelly, the Cook County chief administrative officer, in Tuesday’s crowded Democratic primary race for the House seat vacated by Jesse L. Jackson Jr.

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The mayor’s “super PAC” independently funneled $2.2 million into the campaign on advertisements that extolled Ms. Kelly and her support for national gun legislation and criticized a leading rival who opposed banning assault weapons and was endorsed by the National Rifle Association. Victory in the Democratic primary is considered tantamount to election in the heavily Democratic House district. The election is next month.

Mr. Bloomberg told the reporters that the Kelly primary victory was a sign of what can happen when the public stands up to the gun lobby. Yet analysts in both parties and on both sides of the gun issue cautioned against reading too much into the outcome in a big-city, heavily black district where firearms restrictions generally are popular.

Mr. Biden, who since the Newtown massacre has been leading the Obama administration’s push for legislation, has met with Mr. Bloomberg several times to coordinate that effort. The mayor also met Wednesday with the Senate majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, who controls that body’s schedule, and with three Republican senators whose willingness to compromise is crucial to any gun legislation’s success: Susan Collins of Maine, Mark Steven Kirk of Illinois, both moderates, and John McCain of Arizona.

John Feinblatt, the mayor’s chief policy adviser, said Mr. Bloomberg “talked about his concern that the Senate listen to the American people, who clearly want something done about gun violence.”

Neil Heslin held a picture of himself with his son, Jesse, who was killed in the Newtown massacre, during a Senate hearing Wednesday on banning assault weapons.

Susan Walsh / Associated Press

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing was on a bill, sponsored by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, to ban certain semiautomatic weapons like the one used in Newtown.

Neil Heslin, whose 6-year-old son, Jesse, was killed at Sandy Hook, wept as he recalled his last minutes with Jesse that morning and then how he waited that night in a nearby firehouse until 1 a.m. for confirmation that his son was among the dead.

Holding a framed portrait of himself and his son, Mr. Heslin told how he and Jesse had stopped before school at a deli, where Jesse ordered his favorite breakfast: sausage, egg and cheese on a hard roll, and hot chocolate — his “coffee,” like Dad drank. The clock at Sandy Hook Elementary read 9:04 a.m. when he dropped Jesse off, Mr. Heslin said, and his son “hugged me and held me, and I can still feel that hug and that pat on the back.”

“He said, ‘Everything is going to be O.K., Dad. It’s all going to be O.K.,’ ”Mr. Heslin continued. “And it wasn’t O.K. I have to go home at night to an empty house without my son.”

Dr. William Begg, the physician on duty in the emergency room where the Newtown victims were brought, played a video of two bullets being fired into beige, gelatinous material resembling flesh. One was from a handgun, the other from an AR-15, a popular style of assault rifle. The footage revealed far more tearing and damage from the AR-15.

Dr. Begg, a box of tissues at his side on the witness table, choked up as he read statistics about the frequency of mass shootings in the United States compared with the rest of the world. “This is a tipping point, and this is a public health issue,” he told the senators. “Please make the right decision.”

But in a tense back-and-forth, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, told another witness, Edward A. Flynn, Milwaukee’s chief of police, that the problem was not guns, but those who wielded them.

“I own an AR-15,” Mr. Graham said. “And you may not understand why I want to own an AR-15, and I may not understand what movies you want to watch. But we’re talking about trying to solve a problem that has, as its central core, that the people who are committing these crimes should never have any gun or one bullet.”